Month: June 2012

Deploying VDI should be an easy task, and with a proof of concept or trial it normally is. The problems start to show up when you move from a small deployment to an enterprise rollout. Problems like disk IO, throughput, management, and performance monitoring start to have a significant impact. Nexenta has released their second product after working with VMware as just a way to ease that transition. NexentaVSA for View(NV4V) is first an orchestration engine, followed by a performance tool.

HP has released their Z1 workstation. All-in-One devices have been a double aged sword, but HP touts the Z1 as the first true all-in-one workstation. With the ability to self service parts, run full Xeon processors, and ECC memory, not to mention the ability to run mirrored 2.5″ drives, the Z1 gives you the full workstation flexibility without the footprint of a tower chassis. A few nice features include USB 3.0, an additional display port for dual monitors, the 27″ glossy monitor, and a locking case. The last is most important if you want to have the flexibility of using the included internal USB port. The idea that you could secure a USB drive internal and then still have portable data of a USB drive.

Below is a small video of the system and how you could open and service the unit.

HP released the latest of their cloud offerings today. What was a result of HP printing trying to figure out how to print more in an era of less paper. HP Labs initially looked at a small project that digitized some old books. The thought was that while a publisher will not print a single copy of a book with current digital presses and a collection of books, a printer can not print the single copy. The move into the cloud was simply a way to support the project on a large scale. Bookprep.com lets you search, find, preview rare, out-of-print and hard to find books on every topic imaginable.

HP Discover started today and with it comes the birage of new product announcements. One fo the first ones is for the latest upgrade of the HP StoreOnce deduplication portfolio. EMC is clearly the targeted competitor. The DataDomain and Avamar portfolio are considered by many to be best of breed. Then looking at target side deduplication, few have rivaled the DataDomain portfolio.

Just this past week, DataDomain release the DD990, at the time the fastest throughput archive disk device on the market with a 31 TB/hr throughput rate. This is all done with a single hed unit device, not the much touted Global Deduplication Array (GDA) that was just released last year. This same unit will give you remote replication to 270 sites, completing up to 570 concurrent backup jobs. This by itself is a great product and one that will work in even the largest environments, but what happens if you also want Source-side deduplication?

In comes Avamar. In my experience, the single backup application that when a customer is asked if they like their backup solutions, they actually respond “Yes.” Avamar requires a separate grid and if you want to replicate from a remote site you may end up with a design similar to ones I designed a few years ago. You deploy a client on a endpoint, back up to a small Avamar grid or Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE) and then replicate that branch office back to a main grid at the centralized datacenter.

This all sounds great unless you want to have all your data in a single place and in a single backup solution. If you have been in the EMC circles you have heard the possibility of Avamar backing up to a DataDomain appliance for years, but as of yet they are still seperate systems.

In comes StoreOnce. Today’s announcement for StoreOnce comes in two parts the first performance and the second usability. For performance HP went directly after the DD990 with the latest rendition of the B6200 Backup System. This new solution supports up to 100 TB/hour of backups and up to 40 TB/hour of restore. Personally I think that second part is probably just as important if not more important.

Now what do I do to increase usability? Federated Deduplication is HP’s answer to Avamar. While still requiring the integration with either Symantec OST, or DataProtector 7, StoreOnce Catalyst allows a application server to handle a local backup to any of the approved backup targets, and then replicate without rehydrating the data to a similar device at the datacenter. You now get source-side deduplication with Catalyst at a remote site, and target side dedupe with the main StoreOnce system.

The question that remains to be seen is will this really take a bite out of the enterprise backup market, or will it just force EMC to make the step of combining Avamar with DataDomain? Guess ti remains to be seen, but the performance to me would sure make me think twice before purchasing a new backup device.